How simply upper-casing your password can frustrate a hacker's attempts at breaking into your account

By Graham Smith
Last updated at 4:09 PM on 10th February 2011

Passwords? Pin numbers? There was a time before Internet shopping when they were barely needed.

But their prevalence has, in turn, led to a growth in online accounts being hacked and the need to memorise increasingly unwieldy passwords.

Now, researchers have found that simply by upper-casing your password you can minimise a hacker's chance of breaking into your account.

A six-letter password in lower-case text takes a hacker's computer just ten minutes to crack, according to statistics collated by Bloomberg Businessweek.

But make those letters upper-case and it takes ten hours for it to randomly work out your password.

Add numbers and/or symbols to your password and the hacker's computer has to work for 18 days.

Despite widespread warning, 50 per cent of people choose a common word or simple key combination for their password.

The most used passwords are 123456, password, 12345678, qwerty and abc123.
However, the security conscious among you may want to try this - choose a nine letter password that includes numbers and/or symbols as this would take a hacker's computer a staggering 44,530 years to break.

Sometimes though it's not the fault of the individual.


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